


String-Tangled Fingers

by Bibliotecaria_D



Series: After the End [4]
Category: Transformers, Transformers Generation One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 04:31:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliotecaria_D/pseuds/Bibliotecaria_D
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life keeps going after the Apocalypse. Vortex doesn’t want to die, even when he should.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>Tie a string around your finger...to remember you’ve forgotten something.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	String-Tangled Fingers

**Title:** String-Tangled Fingers  
 **Warning:** Angst.  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Continuity:** G1, Season 3, _After the End_ AU  
 **Characters:** Vortex, Soundwave, Combaticons  
 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn’t own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.  
 **Motivation (Prompt):** _”To remember you’ve forgotten something”_ and, from a prompt post, _“bleak despair”_

[* * * * *

What Vortex remembered most vividly was forgetting things.

It didn't hurt, but that was almost the worst part. Vortex sat against the wall in the Mars’ base repairbay, rotor hub presses flat to his back and hands endlessly twining about each other, and he forgot.

He forgot the savage glee of combat, amped up but moronically violent. Vortex knew the way Brawl had thought, had even come to relish the smash of dumb, physical domination a good fight had brought out in the bruiser. Brute force had triumphed over thought on the gut level where cerebral processors short-circuited under the intensity. Vortex had the shared memories of fists denting metal and the sounds of armor breaking. 

The memories were cored, however, hollowed of actual sensation. Vortex was left with the haunting knowledge that he remembered something incomplete. He held onto Brawl’s mind only to discover the tank’s past emptied of meaning. Brawl’s memory was like a missile silo with no missile inside. Brawl, like the other Combaticons, had disappeared so completely not even the ache of broken gestalt links remained.

 _”Who took them from me?”_ he wanted to demand. _”Give them back!”_

There wasn't anyone left to confront with his demands. Only Soundwave with his impassive visor, towering over him as he ordered the helicopter back to a repair berth. Vortex stared at him blankly for a full klik before the words processed. Standing up seemed like far too much effort, but he couldn't find it in himself to argue. Arguing took the decisiveness to take a stance, and he'd forgotten how to do that.

He got up, but the open space at his back was a sudden, gaping vulnerability. There was only one mech on base to serve as makeshift medic, and Vortex cringed as Soundwave’s rage turned to follow him. There wasn’t much his numbed spark could feel anymore, but the crawling sense of terror remained. Even after the actual emotion sapped away, the memory stayed fresh.

Vortex didn’t want to die. Yet Soundwave had every reason to kill him.

The helicopter edged forward, fumbling baby steps chivvied along by the looming fury at his back. He imagined the base’s defacto medic/commander taking the shot. _Bam_ , right in the back. Would his numbed spark even feel the killing shot? He felt a sick certainty that he’d welcome death if only he’d feel it coming.

But Starscream had assured him that wouldn’t happen. Had informed him that death would be condemnation, not relief.

The only thing more horrifying that the sensory-deprivation box his own spark had become was the idea of never, ever getting out of that box.

So Vortex hunched his shoulders and shuffled along in front of the frigidly angry communication mech. He carefully stayed close to the back wall of the repairbay and aimed for the last berth in the row. The first berth in the repairbay -- the furthest from him and that’s how far away he was going to stay, thank you very much -- held a tiny Cassetticon who might not make it through another night. 

Vortex had done his level best to keep Rumble alive, but that was only after first doing his worst to the little mech. He didn’t regret trying to kill the Cassetticon, but he was well aware he wouldn’t live a klik longer than Rumble if the tiny mech offlined. Soundwave had every reason to shoot him and be done with it. 

It wasn’t like Soundwave didn’t know his weak spots. He’d been in and out of repairbays so often since Bruticus went down that nobody ever got around to assigning him quarters. If it wasn’t for scans on his spark, it was for repairs from self-inflicted wounds or goaded fights. 

Soundwave -- and before him, the Constructicons -- had done everything in their power to keep Vortex from going under. There weren’t enough mechs left after the Quintesson Wars to give up on one. Even one like Vortex. 

The surviving Cybertronians were stubborn like that. Every one of them mattered, these days. They’d survived when all odds said they shouldn’t have, and, like Vortex, they didn’t want to die.

Vortex didn’t want to die. Even when he had difficulty remembering precisely why. No, he _remembered_ , but there was more to memory than data input.

He remembered destroying Autobot installations from orbit, and the precision sniping afterward as the ruins erupted into mad scuttling like a kicked beehive. He remembered the orders, but the vague amusement he knew should be behind the shots was gone. The sense of accomplishment, a distant satisfaction for a job well done -- it just wasn't there. 

The motivation was gone. Why had the memories mattered? He’d known, once. Blast Off had taken his muted emotions to the grave. There were memories scattered about in Vortex’s head like the heatshields and thrusters tumbled on the ground where Bruticus had fell, but the uniting factor had gone. 

In the past, Vortex had sometimes drawn on the shuttle’s aloofness. He’d pulled on the foreign, cool apathy to chill his own manic glee, but it was all gone now. The calm whorl of Blast Off’s spark had pinched off, and now the wound had scabbed over. 

Vortex sat on the repair berth and wondered what Blast Off would have done. Soundwave shoved his chest as if he couldn’t stand touching him, and the helicopter meekly laid back. Compliance was easier than fighting. Vortex could still find it in himself to grasp desperately at memories of emotion, but actually dredging up his own was becoming impossible.

He pictured his spark growing a shell. First a spray of mesh over the surface, like cosmic rust infecting a new host. Complicated traceries followed circuits under the plating, or rather, ran struts and girders in armored framework around his spark. Then the delicate branches sprouted from each line, connecting and blooming and spreading into a transparent scum. Hardening slowly, letting less and less wriggle through the solidifying mass until the shell sealed completed. 

The memories, the data, were trapped in Vortex’s mind. Isolated within, however, there were no personalities or passions. Just leftover information in a leftover mech.

Soundwave roughly strapped Vortex down, handling his wrists and ankles with only the briefest of disdainful touches. The helicopter didn’t struggle. Being restrained, wrists bound by his head and forearms pressing his rotors into the berth, well, he couldn’t say it was pleasant. He also couldn’t say it was unpleasant. To be honest, he didn’t feel much at all about it. 

He felt…fragmented. The Constructicons -- and, later, Soundwave -- had run deep defragments and sorting scans, but Vortex’s cortex had come up clean. The methodless jitter of data jangled endlessly from the broken gestalt links, not from his own head, like phantom pains from the limbs of dead mechs. The memory files weren’t really present, they belonged to other minds, but they plagued Vortex in constant pings of gestalt transmissions. 

Five lives full of memories were packed into his head, but they were delusions and chaos. There was no organization, no rhyme or reason to the madness. The central purpose of every memory was missing, and, disconnected, the memories of five Combaticons fell apart inside him. Vortex no less than the others, but he wasn’t dead yet. Not like the others.

Please, no, not like them.

Vortex didn’t want to die. He thought, floundering in formless memory, that was the only thing keeping him together at all. 

His was the last spark. Five minds of forgotten memories, four dead Combaticons, one living spark. The world was held distant, detached and perceived through a thick shell. Being strapped down was less of a lockdown than what he endured already. 

Soundwave pointedly moved a partition between Vortex and the rest of the repairbay, blocking him out that much more. The helicopter just turned his head toward the back wall and stared sightlessly at his own arm.

Onslaught wouldn’t have tolerated this. He’d have come up with a plan the moment Bruticus fell. Vortex could remember how the tactician’s mind had prickled, always on the verge of something new and devastating. An attack formation in a long-ago battle; a small operation at an outpost; a sting on an Autobot convoy. The first impressions and meticulous files that had assembled a disparate group of four mechs into a combat unit. The past that had forged a solitary mech into one of the greatest tactical minds the Decepticons had possessed.

Vortex wanted to possess Onslaught’s mind. He wanted the feel of that spark surging through the gestalt links, pushing the Combaticons into a cohesive whole outstripping their combined form. Onslaught had turned loyalty programming in an asset, virtual enslavement into opportunity. It hadn’t just been his logical mind, but the drive behind his cold thoughts --

\-- but the mind was gone. The spark had extinguished. Vortex had that which had made up his team leader’s mind, to no avail. Onslaught swam through the bedlam inside his head, but _he_ wasn’t there. There were millions of years of memories, but nothing of Brawl, Blast Off, or Onslaught. The impressions in his thoughts had been left behind by their deaths, but that hadn’t left anything of _them_.

A million memories drowning him, but not a single emotion to save him. Vortex held on to them, dwelled in them, squeezed for every drop of remembered passion or motivation he could wring from the dry data -- and still, his encased spark forgot them orn by orn.

The helicopter stared at nothing, and saw too much. He was motionless, but scrambled for what was left. He was silent, but wished he could dig up enough of something, anything, to scream.

No matter how he searched, there was nothing of Swindle. There were flashes of cunning, disorienting moments of clever ploys, but no Swindle. Around the edges of three dead Combaticons’ memories, bits and pieces of a fourth hid and ran. It would have been frustrating if Vortex were able to rouse that much emotion. As it was, he passively accepted what he couldn’t change. 

He thought, in the numbness of his very being, that if he could only catch the fleeting hints of the conmech, he’d capture the greed and defiance that had run so deep through the other. In his more despairing moments, he thought that was exactly why he couldn’t find the slick conmech anymore. Swindle had given the Combaticons only his hatred, deception, greed, and defiance. Stripped of those feelings, there was nothing substantial underneath to hold onto.

Three dead Combaticons inside one head, and another reluctantly on the fringes. The pale echo of someone who called himself Vortex clung to them. Like any survivor, like every survivor, he helplessly demanded of the universe, _”Who took them from me?”_ He forgot, and remembered forgetting, and felt his hold on his past, on his sanity, on his self -- it slipped a little more. _“Give them back!”_

Like a shadow into oncoming night, the fleeting memory of Swindle ghosted around the faded edges of Brawl, Blast Off, and Onslaught, and it whispered as it went away, _”You never had me.”_

It didn’t hurt. It should have, but it didn’t, and by the time the Autobots came for him, all Vortex remembered was that he’d forgotten something that had once been important. Important, but lost to him.

And the subtle sound of laughter tormented his caged spark, hollow as a Pyrrhic victory.


End file.
